Group items tagged

January 9, 2013 by Jeffrey R. Young "...Setting the Price The company also revealed more details about how it would award certificates and how much it would charge for them. Students who want a verified certificate will have to decide early in the course and pay upfront. Paying that fee will put students on what the company is calling the "Signature Track." The company and colleges are still struggling to decide what to charge for the certificates, though in its latest announcement Coursera said the price would run $30 to $100. "It's a huge decision: You're essentially setting a market," said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, in an interview this week with The Chronicle. "No one has ever priced this before." Officials also stressed that they would offer financial aid to students who demonstrated that they could not afford the fees but could benefit from the verified certificates. Ms. Koller said Coursera would continue to offer free unofficial certificates to students who passed some of its courses. So why would someone pay for the verified certificates? Peter Lange, provost at Duke University, which plans to offer one of the courses in the new pilot, said each free certificate would have a clear disclaimer on it: "It says something to the effect of, We cannot vouch that the person who got this document took the course or did the work." The new Signature Track could mean serious revenue for Coursera, and for the 33 partner colleges that will get a cut of it. Exactly how the colleges will divide that revenue is still being worked out, it seems. Mr. Lange said the question was on the agenda at the next monthly meeting of Duke's Advisory Committee on Online Education." So, when Coursera staff offered free Statements of Accomplishment as "Recognition" to the volunteers of the Global Translator community, they did so in full awareness of their lack of value and of the mentioned disclaimer

"Hi, Today we made some changes at Ning. I want to share with you the email Jason Rosenthal, our CEO, sent to all Ning employees: Team, When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what's working, what's not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success. My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us. So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy. As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies. I've never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months. We'll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus. Thanks, Jason Rosenthal I know many of you will have que

"by Lauren Lindstrom, The Blade/TNS | February 5, 2016 TIFFIN, Ohio - A judge has ordered Seneca Re-ad Industries Inc. to pay more than $54,000 in damages and back pay after ruling that the sheltered workshop wrongly set subminimum wages for three of its employees with disabilities. Judge Steven D. Bell, an administrative law judge for the U.S. Department of Labor, ruled this week that the employer was not justified when it paid three of its employees below minimum wage. He also ruled that the subminimum wages were not accurately assessed. The case involves three employees of the Seneca Re-Ad Center, a sheltered workshop in Fostoria. In a petition filed in November with the Department of Labor, the employees said their disabilities, which include visual impairment and Asperger's syndrome, did not interfere with their work productivity and they should be paid minimum wage."

January 19, 2016 "Starting today, when you enroll in certain courses, you'll be asked to pay a fee (or apply for Coursera's financial aid program) if you'd like to submit required graded assignments and earn a Course Certificate. You can also choose to explore the course for free, in which case you'll have full access to videos, discussions, and practice assignments, and view-only access to graded assignments. You'll see the options for each individual course when you click "enroll" on the course information page; courses that aren't part of this change will continue to show the options to enroll in the course either with or without a Certificate. Most courses that are part of Specializations will begin offering this new experience this week, and certain other courses will follow later this year."

Ironia: quando ho fatto questo segnalibro, il solo tag raccomandato (dal blog Coursera) che è apparso era "mooc"...

"The Year of the MOOC (...) MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses. "

"Summary of a presentation by Phillip D. Long, University of Queensland We want to see the learning design patterns change, we want to see phy6sical participation in the profession, that is, engagement with the content and the practice, in the rich spaces that we have, and let the content engagement, which can be well-designed online, be the place where content is delivered. (Eg. Pictures of classes, eg., composed of 'terraces'). Recently, we tried bringing people together en masse. We took a large space that is a sports facility and turned it into a learning environment, tables of nine, an instructor and two TAs, and engagement simply in terms of 'showing up' is stunning, 85-90 per cent attendance. Our engagement with MOOCs, and we've just started to partner with EdX, is because we are learning how to refactor how learning on campus takes place, to put the effort into learning design into the online context, moving away from these little boxes, and looking at the campus as a series of practice spaces. (SD- Stephen Downes: This is a good model - but one wonders why it would be reserved for tuition-paying students - why not move it out into the community as a whole - you'd get *much* better 'tables of nine')"

SD = Stephen Downes

Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the E-books Press Conference Washington, D.C. ~ Wednesday, April 11, 2012 "Earlier today, we filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, against Apple and five different book publishers - Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. In response to our allegations, three of these publishers - Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster - agreed to a proposed settlement. If approved by the court, this settlement would resolve the Department's antitrust concerns with these companies, and would require them to grant retailers - such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble - the freedom to reduce the prices of their e-book titles. The settlement also requires the companies to terminate their anticompetitive most-favored-nation agreements with Apple and other e-books retailers. In addition, the companies will be prohibited for two years from placing constraints on retailers' ability to offer discounts to consumers. They will also be prohibited from conspiring or sharing competitively sensitive information with their competitors for five years. And each is required to implement a strong antitrust compliance program. These steps are appropriate - and essential in ensuring a competitive marketplace. Beginning in the summer of 2009, we allege that executives at the highest levels of the companies included in today's lawsuit - concerned that e-book sellers had reduced prices - worked together to eliminate competition among stores selling e-books, ultimately increasing prices for consumers. As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles. During regular, near-quarterly meetings, we allege that publishing company executives discussed confidential business and competitive matters - including Amazon's e-book retailing practices - as part of a conspiracy

"Oettingen's team call this strategy "mental contrasting" - thinking about how wonderful it would be to achieve your goals, while paying due attention to where you're at now and all the distance and difficulties that lie in between."

"The Web Literacy Standard (specification) The Web Literacy Standard is a map of competencies and skills that Mozilla and our community of stakeholders believe are important to pay attention to when getting better at reading, writing and participating on the web. Keep up to date with the latest changes to the Web Literacy Standard on the wiki."

Bello! Poi dal link in "Translate the Web Literacy Standard into your language. Get involved! " in calce, si arriva in qualche click https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/webmaker/viewstrings/#it/weblit/18157959 , che sarebbe la sottopagina della traduzione collaborativa di Web Literacy Standard in italiano: che di per sé è completa, ma non appare nella lista delle lingue di "Web Literacy Standard", presumibilmente perché aspettano che sia completa la traduzione di tutte le parti di Webmaker. Però intanto, se non si capisce qualcosa in questa parte, si può già utilizzare questa sottopagina Transifex, che ha pure il motore di ricerca.

"RATES $0.40 - $0.65 Range of pay per audio minute $241 Average earnings per month $1,495 Top monthly earning "

"We now require captcha on many social features, such as following people, joining groups, etc. For a very nominal fee, you can upgrade yourself to "Social Membership," which would grant you full social features without capcha, plus a lot of other goodies. We expect to stop the vast majority of the spammers with this simple measure. We'd like to elaborate more about Social Membership and its pricing and our thoughts behind the decisions. As long-time Diigo users know, Diigo is a personal knowledge management tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community on the other hand. While it is perfectly fine to use Diigo solely as the former, we do believe that the value of the knowledge-sharing community could be substantial, as the number of active users increases, and as the spam is minimized. As a result, we have decided to set the social membership annual fee at $5/year on Oct 1, 2014, and will increase the price gradually thereafter according to a pre-determined formula, as the number of active social members increases. To reward existing users, an attractive promotion price of $2/year will be available until Oct. 1, 2014. For future years, you will continue to pay the low annual price you paid in the first year, as long as your credit card stay valid for automatic renewal. We have also taken this opportunity to re-adjust our pricing plan to better align users needs with our business model. Existing basic and premium users will be automatically upgraded to Standard in the new pricing plan."

Attenzione a quel "new pricing plan" https://www.diigo.com/premium che limita drasticamente il numero dei gruppi per le formule meno care, ma non è chiaro cosa succederà ai gruppi creati con formula gratuita.

Chris Hoofnagle, director of BCLT's privacy programs | 3/6/13 "...We need to be less infatuated with "the cloud," which to some extent is a marketing fad. Many of the putative benefits of the cloud are disclaimed in these services' terms of service. For instance, a 2009 survey of 31 contracts found that, "…In effect, a number of providers of consumer-oriented Cloud services appear to disclaim the specific fitness of their services for the purpose(s) for which many customers will have specifically signed up to use them." The same researchers found that providers' business models were related to the generosity of terms. This militates towards providers that charge some fee for service as opposed to "free" ones that monetize user data. We should charge our IT professionals with the duty of documenting problems with outsourced services. To more objectively understand the cloud phenomenon, we should track the real costs associated with outsourcing, including outages, the costs of managing the relationship with Google, and the technical problems that users experience. Outsourcing is not costless. We could learn that employees have simply been transferred from the operation of CalMail to the management of bMail. We should not assume that systems mean fewer people-they may appropriately require meaningful staffing to fulfill our needs. As the expiration date of system wide Google contract approaches in June 2015, these metrics will help us make an economical decision. Finally, there are technical approaches that, if effective, could blunt, but not completely eliminate, the privacy problems created by cloud services. Encryption tools, such as CipherCloud, exist to mask data from Google itself. This can help hide the content of messages, reduce data mining risks from Google, and cause the government to have to come to Berkeley officials to gain access to content. The emergence of these services indicates that there is a shared concern about s

Attenzione alla data: alcune cose potrebbero essere cambiate nel frattempo.

"Last week, the University made its decision final, and announced that it will begin the process of removing all the content on March 15th. To add insult to injury, it turns out that removing this digital library will ultimately end up requiring about five months worth of work- a cost UC Berkeley will be forced to pay."

Articolo "anti-stato" sulla disputa tra Berkeley e il Dipartimento della Giustizia US (DoJ) in merito all'accessibilità dei corsi pubblici di Berkeley. L'autrice ignora deliberatamente diversi fatti: il riconoscimento da parte del DoJ degli sforzi di Berkeley per implementare l'accessibilità, il fatto che i video inaccessibili non verranno cancellati, ma il loro accesso verrà per ora ristretto, ecc,